Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 12

Hi folks,
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These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler
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**Patch schedule for the rest of the year**
Haven't done one of these in a bit so figured it was a good time to talk about our approach to patches through 2019. (For those who haven't seen, we have a schedule of this year's patch dates published on the support site: https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018987893-League-of-Legends-patch-schedule) First up, the standard LoL side of things (SR etc). This is all from the perspective of balance/widespread meta impacting work. New content like skins, champs etc will continue to release as usual.
9.14 - A pretty large patch with a lot of different champs getting work. Expectation is we'll probably do a small follow up micropatch a few days after 9.14 releases since with around 30 champs getting changed odds are there'll be at least one who needs some quick correction afterwards.
9.15 - 9.18 - Smaller patches, focused on stability and lower scope balance work. We'll be looking to avoid things with big systemic impacts here in particular (e.g. reworking items, changing strength of different positions significantly relative to each other, changes to objectives etc).
9.19 - Worlds patch. Focus here is on stable, reliable.
9.20 - 9.22 - Patches between Worlds and Preseason. Some work, including some behind the scenes technical stuff that's a bit risky to put in the Worlds patch, goes here. Generally we try not to get the Worlds patch and the state of the regular game get too out of sync though, so large work will be usually held for preseason.
9.23 - Preseason. This should be mid November. We'll start talking details about what's in it before though, probably sometime late September or early October.
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**TFT Patching**
On the TFT side of things by contrast we've got a lot of plans for both balance and ongoing feature development in the 9.15-9.19 sort of range (and onwards of course). During the mode's initial release we've been doing a lot of balance through micropatches as we get things generally into an ok state. Going forward plan is to do more balance through regular patches, including with patch notes so it's much easier to track what's going on. Still expecting we'll hotfix extremely out of line things quickly though of course, especially where they're warping the whole meta around themselves.
As a quick recap in terms of TFT in 9.14 we’re expecting we’ll ship:
* DPS meters
* A new unit (Twisted Fate, 2 cost Pirate Sorcerer with Pick a Card)
* A lot more visible stats when you inspect a unit
* A lot of balance changes
* A lot of bug fixes
* Changes to how PVE rounds drop rewards
* Reworks of some items
* Win/loss streak UI improvements
* And more
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**Looking at Irelia in 9.15**
We're putting most of our 9.15 time aside for follow up on 9.14 and longer term work on preseason projects. It's likely we'll at least look at Irelia from the angle of her being too dominant in pro play in particular. Not sure yet what changes that might or might not result in though.
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png

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